Providing Reiki to friends, family, and clients is an honor and sacred trust. People are vulnerable in your presence. They share deep concerns with you. May the guidelines below smooth the way as your Reiki practice expands and your journey continues.
1. Provide a safe place
Help clients be comfortable. Have water available. Assure confidentiality of records and information. Be obvious about handwashing and fresh linens. Describe what a session looks like. Ask if they can comfortably lie on their back for the length of the session. Offer alternatives such as lying on their side or in a recliner. Place your hands on your body to demonstrate where touch will occur. Do they prefer hands on or hands off treatment? Are there areas they prefer no touch? Provide clients the opportunity to use the bathroom before the session begins. Offer a blanket even when the room is warm. Ask if they have questions. Now you are ready to begin the session.
2. What you offer is enough
You will attract the clients you are meant to serve. You may have doubts that you have the skills to respond to the challenges they present. Set aside your ego. Reiki heals, not us. After the session, you may be concerned you talked too much or fault yourself for your wandering mind. Considering how the session could have gone better and making changes, allows you to become a better practitioner. We continue to learn and grow throughout our careers. We continue to self-assess, take classes, and gain insights from our clients and other practitioners. Self-reflection improves our practice and ourselves. Our clients are our teachers.
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3. Reiki is not talk therapy
Let clients know they can tell you anything or nothing at all. Avoid getting caught up in the client’s story. Out of respect for the client’s privacy, don’t press for details and record them. Understand that clients are releasing their experiences to the universe. Allow the universe to answer them through Reiki. Trust Reiki to respond in the manner and level appropriate to the situation. Healing happens on the table, not during the intake.
4. Honor the client’s experience
Avoid building expectations for a particular type of experience or healing during the session. Clients are unique and their experiences will be unique. Some will feel the energy working; some will not. Some will have multi-faceted experiences that may include sound, color, angelic beings, or other phenomena. One experience is not better than the other. Reiki works no matter the client’s experience. Following the session, ask neutral questions. Would you like to share anything about your session? Allow silence. Give clients time to integrate their experiences. Leave the interpretation of what happened during the session to them. They are the experts on themselves.
5. Refer clients to resources
Stay within your scope of practice. When clients have chronic issues that are not resolved through Reiki, recommend they seek additional resources such Alcoholics Anonymous, medical doctors or counselors. You may suspect diet as the cause of the client’s fatigue, but unless you are trained as a nutritionist, do not give advice. You do not know if underlying issues, such as pre-diabetes, need to be addressed along with diet. We do not work in a vacuum; we are not the only answer to the client’s quest. Reiki is both a stand-alone treatment and a wonderful supplement to other interventions.
Providing Reiki is a gift to others and to yourself. Allow your practice to unfold. Withhold judgement, allow change, keep learning. Trust yourself. Trust Reiki. We welcome you to the long, honored line of healers that extends from the far past into the distant future.
Namaste.
* This article is part of our Ask RMT project where experienced Reiki Masters answer questions from members of our Reiki Rays community. You can find our Ask RMT series of articles here.
Article by Wanda Buckner, Ed.D.
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Wanda Buckner, EdD, is a people and pet psychic and healer. She supports people and animals in repairing their past, healing their present, and embracing their future. Wanda is a gifted psychic, medium, healer, hypnotherapist, and interspecies communicator/instructor. She is a Holy Fire Reiki Master/Instructor and certified in Healing Touch for both people and animals. Her business, Healing Energy Services for People and Animals, opened in 2005. Wanda holds a doctorate degree in Educational Leadership. Her book, Choosing Energy Therapy: A Practical Guide to Options for People and Animals, provides information on energy healing for people and animals. Wanda is a contracted provider for Reiki, Healing Touch and Hypnotherapy with Assured Hospice and volunteers weekly with a holistic veterinarian providing energy work for animals. Wanda teaches, speaks, and practices in Olympia WA and at a distance, anywhere.
Wanda can be reached through her website, www.healingenergyservices.com
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